From making do to living

[SuZir]

My Fb has been spammed by this column in one of our mental health/family support organisation's webpage. Several of my Fb friends have found it poignant enough to share it or comment it or refer it as their New Year resolution.

Not linking it here because the language barrier, but it talks about how idea that one just has to make do, preferably by themselves, on their own and through even the most gruesome obstacles, and how the generations before us made do even though much more difficult circumstances, that is very paramount in our culture is making us miserable and how we should forsake the idea and just start living - and even admitting and accepting that at times we don't make do on our own. Admitting needing help and not being content of just making it through the day and getting by.

I have read the column at least five times already, started and stopped in midway few times more. Been sarcastic about it, felt angry about it, rolled my eyes, been little wistful over it and what not. I do find an idea naive and idealistic and useless if also luring. I mean, if I'm not forcing myself to make do, then what? Is it really more 'living' if I lay on my bathroom floor in fetal position sucking my thumb? What good it would do to anyone? When I force myself to make do, at least I'm functional. Work, feed my family, pay taxes, do things. What does it matter, if it is just faking it?

And how about those, who have actual problems? I just have ptsd by proxy and some old family stuff that about every other person does.

Then again, I do not know, why I keep going back to that darn article...

 

[Lothlorien]

Is that the name of the article? I'm curious because a couple different articles popped up on my fb the last couple of days.

Sent using ConductDisorders mobile app

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

Like you, SuZir, initially I was so sure of my position that keeping a stiff upper lip is best. But the more I wrote in defense of that position, the more I couldn't stop thinking about the comfort and strength to be found in admitting that we have been traumatized, and need to be treated gently.

Eventually, I concluded that, though it is uncomfortable to be identified as someone who is struggling with, or who has survived, something terrible...that is where we find the strength to change our interpretations of the meaning of the thing.

And that was when I realized I was wrong in thinking I believed a stiff upper lip was the way to go.

Think of all the shaming perceptions that have been changed by victims sharing the pain of their reality and changing things for themselves and for the rest of us, too. Racism, cancer,
abuse of any kind, the fight for rights to marriage or to the vote, rules to limit the worst of the horrors of war.

So, it isn't about lying on the floor with our thumbs in our mouths, but it is about facing our pain, about confronting injustice, about creating change in the definition of what a thing is and how to cope with it.

Valuable post, SuZir.

I have learned to take courage and even, pride, in my own story from answering.

So, I am stronger, now.

:O)

Cedar